John D. Lyons examines some of the most canonical works of the seventeenth-century Golden Age: Corneille’s Le Cid (1637) and Rodogune (1644–45), and Racine’s Britannicus (1669) and Phèdre (1677), proposing that the decisive actions of these plays often hinge on what women say, or do not say. This is far from surprising since these works are contemporaneous with two important interrelated cultural developments in the public lives of women: increasingly, they hosted Parisian salons and gaining increased importance in the political, cultural and social spheres; and in a century that witnessed attempts to standardize and refine the French language, these salons run by women became virtual workshops for formulating rules of discourse for a worldly, non-pedantic society. Tragedies from this period, perceived as the dramatic representation of the lives of kings, queens and princes, simultaneously display the sharp contrast between what can women say in public, what they conceal owing to the constraints on what they are allowed to say, and their awareness that what they say in public can have fatal consequences. These tragedies enable an appreciation of the aptness of Roland Barthes’ assertion that language, more than death, is the core of the tragic.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) credited his contemporary Jacques Amyot’s (1513–93) translations of Plutarch (Lives, 1559; Moralia, 1572) with lifting him out of the mire of ignorance and inspiring him to write the Essays.1 Together, Amyot and Montaigne ensured the tremendous cultural importance of Plutarch in France from the late sixteenth century onwards.2 After a decline during the Enlightenment when the Encyclopédistes deemed his ideas obscure, Plutarch again rose to prominence at the close of the eighteenth century thanks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and the revolutionaries. A republican Plutarch had replaced Plutarch as the “mirror for princes” whose works the playwright and historiographer Jean Racine (1639–99) had read to an ailing Louis XIV.

In this chapter I show how the job of the Baroque actor was to embellish the dramatic poem, and as it were to colour in the outline provided by the text. Actor and writer: Racine coached young actresses in exactly how to deliver his lines, but experienced actors wanted more autonomy. ‘Action’ in sacred oratory: Louis de Crésolles’ Jesuit treatise on acting atomized the body, and allowed Christians to think in a technical way about their performance methods, but Le Faucheur’s Protestant manual placed more emphasis on authenticity of feeling. Mondory and Corneille: A reading of Le Cid reveals the physicality and emotionalism expected of the celebrity lead actor, in a balance of power between actor and writer that would subsequently be eroded. The first manuals dedicated to stage acting: Perrucci and Gildon look back to seventeenth-century practice, as does Jean Poisson, the first professional actor to offer advice about performance to non-actors in a printed manual of 1717. Another actor, Luigi Riccoboni, in 1728 published a manifesto for novice Italian actors, warning them against French formalism and arguing for the primacy of feeling. He is less interested in the work of the voice, and more concerned with the way feeling operates on the body.